Getting Me
Continuing with sketches from my return to my own individuality as an artist....because they show me, as I'm reviewing them, where my head was at the time and it's not so easy to do that when you're actually in the midst of the thing.
I change; I morph; I transform...it's what I do...I grow...constantly moving from one stage to another. Often, when a big change is at its peak, I feel as if I am dying...literally, physically dying. Luckily, after decades of experiencing change as The End, I began to catch on in my fifties to the fact that I was interpreting what was basically my Spirit Self shifting gears as dying and from then on have been able to remind myself when another shift is upon me, that I am most likely not dying. It's been very helpful.
The little sketch above is stark by comparison to the one I posted last week where a fire was raging in the center of the triangle and beams of light shot out the top. Here everything has been reduced to symbol: a Square defined by 4 small Circular dots, and a Triangle, the basic geometrical shapes. Within them, a sliver of a flame, alive and pulsing within the contrasting symmetrical geometric shapes.
This image came to me in meditation. I did not try to 'understand' it, I just drew it...and drew it...and drew it, many times over. It felt like life, like the safekeeping of life, the essence of life, protected. Now when I feel it, it feels like something that was inside me, a creative spark that was burning, burning, burning...waiting, maybe, to explode, rather like the feeling in the sketch that preceded it. In retrospect I imagine me having burst out in creative frenzy, then reeling myself back in, still caught in the net my husband had thrown over me, still bound by his dictum that I could not go public without him...but burning, none the less.
Starting over....
I'd stated when I began the "Artist Blog" that I was using it as a writing discipline which, in retrospect, was pretty silly. If ever there were a person who didn't need more discipline, it's me. I am flat out the most disciplined person I know. My life runs on a tight schedule. I really didn't need to another thing to be writing about to add to my to-do list. That said, I haven't yet read one piece of 'advice on getting yourself known' that doesn't tell you to blog...about your own work, yet.
I've just felt as if...well...who really wants to know all that? It seems so self-serving. And yet, I guess that's what you need to be if it's your Self that you want to get out there. So I'm re-vamping. And what I'm going to do is go back into the archives, start at the beginning of my individual work and, I guess, start talking...about me as an artist and about the work that I've created.
I don't think I'll even try to keep a regular schedule, that'll let me feel as if I have one less obligation, which I could use and I'm not sure what I'll do when I catch up to myself but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
So for now...we'll start here:
As you may be able to see from the date in the corner, this watercolor pencil sketch is from 1996. It was probably created while sitting naked on the beach at Sandy Hook NJ and may well be the result of a dream I had while napping there.
In 1996 I was just out of a years long artistic relationship with my then husband. From about 1985 - 1993 or so we had painted together as a collaborative artist; we called ourselves "a two-headed, four-handed artist." We took turns painting and so always had 2 or 3 pieces going at once. The collaborative idea had been his idea, born out of his love of color and desire to create and also of wanting to create, rather specifically, with me. We had a couple of spectacular sales but an otherwise below average life as an artist and did much better with the lecturing side of things.
I had a problem with the relationship because I had desires to create on my own and because he saw my individual efforts as detracting from our combined efforts as The Two-Headed, Four-Handed Artist, he was adamant that I keep my art to myself.
By 1996, though, I had begun working on my own as a hands-on healer. I was getting a real taste of creativity as I moved in and out of energy fields, sensing at a very deep level, what was going on inside bodies and minds, hearts and souls and so I took advantage of beach days to express what was happening inside me. This very symbolic little piece was very representative of the feeling I had of a burning desire to create that was shining a light for me.
Circles and triangles always spoke to me in terms of balance and of the perfection of nature and they show up a lot in my sketches and in my work still. And, as I think of it, the work I do now is still all about conveying feeling energy so I guess, in many ways, this small sketch is kind of a seed of what was to come.
Interesting.
To me at least.
Bad Art?
When you're working on something that's feeling kind of mediocre it's still a disappointment when at the end of it all what you have is a mediocre piece of art but when you're creating a piece that feels like it might, just could be one of the best things you've ever done and your friend's two year old pokes a chopstick through it, that's devastating. That's hard to get past. But making bad art, well, that's kind of par for the course because we're not perfect, are we?
But then, what do you do with the bad art? I hate to toss it. I mean, I made it; it's kind of my child. On the other hand, do I really want it out there, representing me even though it undeniably represents a part of me, otherwise how did it get here? And you know what, sometimes the bad art sells.
Back in the 80s when my second husband and I were working as a collaborative artist and doing pretty well for a two-headed artist, we'd do art shows. Our work, which was kind of silly and bright and mostly reflected him, always attracted attention but didn't necessarily generate a lot of sales. On one particularly beautiful day when the vast majority of people were going to find a way to be outside one way or another we were having a particularly slow day. The only piece we sold that day was one of the worst pieces we'd ever created...and the buyer was thrilled. You just never know. I had to let my husband handle the sale because he didn't know a damn thing about bad or good art, he just liked to paint and her pretty much loved anything he did. I could never have done a convincing job.
It doesn't pay to be too attached your work either way, though I confess to pricing my favorites high enough that I feel well compensated when they leave me and I never price the work I am less thrilled with too low, lest my opinion of my own work damage someone else's opinion of it.
I have a landscape I painted (I paint them as a break from my 'real' work) that I think might look clunky to someone else and I just love it. No matter that the clouds actually look as if they might weigh something, the flow and the feel and the flavor of the overall piece appeal to me tremendously. Something in my heart warms when I see it. It might just be a poor painting but it brings something ineffable to me and you just never know what your work might bring to someone is my point. There's no logical reason why I love that piece just like there's no logical reason why I don't love the landscape I completed before this one despite the fact that, to me at least, it's clearly a much better painting. Art is like that.
Yeah, it is.
Both Sides Now
I’m an artist. Before anything, I guess, I’m an artist. But my business card reads, Victoria Pendragon, Creative Spirit because, well, I’m a writer too and I’ve been doing both since I was first able to control something that I could make marks with. Technically, I guess I was actually a professional at being a writer before I was professional at being an artist, having been first published nationally in my senior year of high school. But I went to school for art. Because that’s what my mother wanted me to do and good for her because it’s waaaaaay more fun than writing is.
In any given day, both aspects usually get equal time because they balance each other nicely. I get so wound up emotionally when I’m making art that writing offers me an opportunity to cool off and slow down. After spending an hour or more in front of the screen, though, I’m pining for lusciousness, for something I don’t have to work at, because I have to work at writing; the art comes more naturally, perhaps because I am a more visual person.
I took a test once in a class on left and right brain dominance and I came out dead center. I took a Meyers Briggs test once and that came out might close to center as well. And I’m ambidextrous, can paint – and write, albeit backwards – with both hands. I think there’s some kind of balance built into my system that is expressed in the desire to both write and make art. My brother, a doctor, tells me that the human body is not built to be even left handed let alone ambidextrous. He says there’s a sort of internal flow that gets disrupted and pointed out that those folks unfortunate enough to have their organs in backwards – flipped, right to left – have a very difficult time of it. Interesting.
I don’t know if the writing/making art thing has any relation to the ambidextrous thing or not, I just find it coincidental. I find life interesting…and people…and bugs…and pretty much everything, I guess and that may be where my proclivities find common ground, in the fascination I have for existence which is, in and of itself, a duality.
In Sickness and in Health
I guess it shouldn't surprise me because the whole process is so physical for me. I mean I can only do so much without getting very worked up. When a piece is going really well, my body temperature often rises, my heart beats faster, ultimately my legs get a little weak so I guess I should have been able to extrapolate from that that if I got to feeling under the weather, it might put me off production. But I get sick so rarely that it didn't really occur to me.
Normally I kind of work like a mad woman, in bursts of focused artistic creativity broken up by stints of writing. But I've only been concentrating on this creative aspect of my life as a sole focus for about the last year and a half and happily hadn't run into the challenge of not being entirely well.
Can I just say, I hate it. I never really minded too much being sick when I had a 9 -5 job but now that I'm doing what I love to do, what I want to do, I regard it as kind of...well, insulting is the only word I can think of. I don't like being compromised. I figure I'm compromised enough without having my energy depleted by some microscopic creature. But I will rest because I will do whatever I have to do to get healthy again because I don't like to work compromised. Can't really. I don't have it to give. So I'm a very compliant sick person. I'm just kind of irritable.
Can you tell?
Belated Blogday
Well, perhaps more correctly put, I was so busy re-making art - like 5 or 6 times - that I forgot about quite a few things including this blog until I was too brain dead to do another thing.
Here's how it went: I was attempting to create a grid for the words on one of my Mai Ku series. Mai Ku is my version of Haiku, fourteen syllable poems that I create in dye on silk that are then laid atop a collage with images that carry the sense or feeling of the poem.
The challenges are numerous but the first one comes with trying to make an aesthetic arrangement of the words to fit in the 10x10" space that is available for them. As a rule, there's a lot of scratchpad work as I search for the arrangement that works for me and the words both. Then comes laying out the words on a grid that I can place beneath the silk so that I can re-create them in resist in order to lay in the dye. And that - laying them on the grid - is the tricky part as sometimes, owing to the various lengths of words, some lines (there are always 4 lines) have more letters - sometimes a lot more letters - on them than others so the sizes of the letters varies ever so slightly from line to line as do the spaces between them. It can't vary too much or the overall sense of balance is disturbed so it's a very difficult process.
This is a completed grid that went well. Not easily - they're never easy - but well. But the one I wrestled with yesterday - the partner to this one, about waking up - gave me a whole world of trouble and just when I thought I'd finally pinned it to the ground I discovered that I'd repeated a word! There it was at the end of line 3 and there it was again at the beginning of line 4. Bollocks.
So the grid that I ended up with looks nowhere near as neat as this one. It's got grid bits taped down all over it and white-out on it and places where the paper is almost erased through but the important thing is that it's finally done and now hiding beneath a sheer layer of silk and I've had something to bitch about.
The offending grid, now preparing to dye, as well it should.
Maintenance
Ugh. Not my favorite kind of week.
When I first started creating the kind of mixed media pieces I’m doing now I was on my own. I’d never seen nor heard of anyone doing what I was doing, which is to say, layering painted silk over collage and then working more on top of that. As time has passed, I’ve refined many aspects of the work, learning as I go and one of the things I’ve learned is about the glazing of the finished piece.
When I started, I was using a very thick glaze both for adhering the silk to the base and as a finish for the completed work. The surface was kind of uneven but I was loath to put more glaze on as it was pretty thick already and very glossy…in places. And that was the problem because in some spots, the glaze was sinking in to the silk while over the collaged areas it was, of course, not. So I started experimenting with thinner glazes on the newer pieces but was running into the same splotchiness issues, though I finally realized that with the thinner glazes I actually could apply additional coats without fear as long as I gave each coat ample time to dry. I finally ended up with exactly the look I wanted.
Only many of the earlier pieces didn’t have it and were still a little ragged so this week I dragged everything out of storage, assessed the pieces one by one by one, and ended up with quite a lot of work to do…and not creative work, work. Owing to the size of my workspace, which happens to co-exist with part of our living space – I had a limited area in which I could be laying out work to dry which meant that I had to proceed in batches of about four. Then, after each new layer, every one had to be re-inspected and re-glazed or not and if not, had to be relocated for final drying so they could be stored again.
What a pain. I got of writing done but I sure didn’t get a lot of painting done. I’m used to having about three pieces going at a time – because of drying times – so I got to feeling pretty creatively logy by week’s end because writing just doesn’t do for me what making art does.
Still, it feels good to know that I can mount a show at a moment’s notice if I need to. I’m sure I’ve saved myself either a massive amount of work under pressure or a big disappointment somewhere down the line.
I hope so.
Nexium for the Soul
More on Copyright
So, I’m still walking with this but no more agida…of course that could be the medication…but no, I’ve actually come to a conclusion that I can feel good about, feel in integrity with, i.e.: credit where credit is due.
Based on the 67 different things I read about what was acceptable use of a published image – or not – I decided earlier this week that what I’d do is make note, wherever possible, of the source of any image I use that’s ‘recognizable.’ That information will go on the back of the work itself and in any description I may be asked to provide of the work.
I spent much of the week, though, pondering why it was that I couldn't use parts of photographs that were published millions of times and were, after all, photographs. Not that I diminish photography as an art form but after all, there is a difference between an art photographer – one who creates images by manipulating – and a photographer. There’s no denying that some photographers are more gifted than others but there’s also no denying that if there’s an apple tree standing in a field, darn near anyone can get a decent picture of it these days, cameras having come as far as they have.
I made a decision early in this particular branch of my work not to utilize either someone elses drawing or painting or digital art in my work because that really did feel as though I were capitalizing on someone elses work. But if I want a sense of ‘art’ I will snip out a picture of a framed picture and use that because in doing so I am acknowledging the art and the artist, I am not using his or her images for the sake of their images but for the reason that a framed picture conveys immediately the sense of someone elses art which is exactly why I would be wanting that image in the first place.
Just this morning, as I was lying in bed, I had a significant release from this whole conundrum: quotes. All of us quote. Writers continually quote other writers. Each chapter of my latest book opens with a quote from someone and, guess what, no copyright issues! So what I am doing now is quoting, I’m just quoting images instead of words.
Relief at last! For me anyway.
Copyright Agida
What is clear is that you can’t sell someone else’s work as your own. Fair enough. I wouldn’t want anyone making copies of my work and selling it as their own or, for that matter, making copies and selling it as mine. But, frankly, if someone was out there printing copies of my work and doing to it what I do to the photos in magazines, I wouldn’t care. It would be collage, digital or traditional, and collage has always been cutting up other people’s images and using them to create something new. It’s something new, for Pete’s sake! (And who is Pete, anyway? Has he got his name copyrighted? Doesn’t he want some credit?) I’d be kind of tickled that someone liked something I did enough to sample it as long as they didn’t claim to have created it originally.
Besides making art, I write. I’ve self published three books and have a fourth being published by Ozark Mountain Publishing. The three books I’ve self published all state somewhere that people are welcome to use my words anywhere that those words would be appropriate as most of what I’ve written has been said before by someone else, somewhere else and/or, it’s information that really needs to be out in the world. The book that’s been published by a publishing company, though, that’s another matter. They’ve got rights.
For the stuff I’ve written that’s strictly mine, I’d love a nod of the head or something if someone quotes me outright. Acknowledgement is important, it matters. It’s the difference between right use of someone else’s words and plagiarism. Whenever I can, if I’m saying something that was once told to me by someone else, I’ll be saying where I got it. Pretending that someone else’s words are mine feels intrinsically wrong to me, even if I’m only re-stating a concept that someone else has come up with, I’ll likely say where I heard it. I’ve spent almost twenty years giving a woman who was outright rude to me credit for one very clever thing she said, that she picked up from someone else. I’d rather I knew who the someone else was, so I could correctly attribute the quote, but I don’t so I can’t and I finally decided this year that I’ve been using the phrase for so long and giving this person who seriously dissed me credit for it when it isn’t even hers that I’m going to stop giving her credit and just use the damn phrase saying that “I once heard…”. I can be comfortable with that.
My point is, I’m kind of scrupulous about giving credit where credit is due – and apparently sometimes even when it’s not – so I should probably stop stressing out over being sued by some magazine for using three inches of a photograph they published five years ago. Or maybe I should just start listing everyplace the images I use come from…but I’m not sure how that would work as I already have thousands of images in my stockpile with no idea where at least half of them are from.
It’s collage! It’s always been fine. WTF. I don’t want to be accused of thievery because I’m using a shot of something that has been identified and seen by countless thousands of people and is now mostly in a trash pile or a recycling plant. I’m honoring the work! I’m not throwing it out. I’m recycling it. My work is honoring other peoples work and the earth. I’m not pretending that I shot it, I’m just re-using it and in the best way I know how…it’s art raised to the power of 2. Please don’t fuss. I’ve already got agita over this and I don’t need it. Life is hard enough already. I just want to make it prettier and smarter.
Meaning
I love beautiful things, most people do, I think. But I’m pretty much content to enjoy their beauty and let them go. The experience of a particularly beautiful flower, for instance is, for me, nothing like what happens when I see a picture of a particularly beautiful flower. If, on the other hand, the picture of the particularly beautiful flower was taken by me at the moment just after I was struck with the scent, shape, color, lilt, attitude or whatever, then it brings me back to my original experience and therefore carries a depth – a meaning, if you will – that another person’s picture of the very same flower, looking the very same way, in the very same place but which I had never experienced, never could.
Meaning matters to me. Some people collect pretty things simply because they are pretty; I don’t. There’s just so much pretty in the world…it’s everywhere…and I’m not inclined to own it all. I’ve discovered over time that I respond to some attractive things with a sense of bond, or connection and that, over time, the connection fades and the object becomes just another pretty thing. I don’t know why that happens, though I suspect that some kind of internal energy shift is at work, that some aspect of my vibration has shifted. I do know, though, that once the bond has disappeared, the object will soon follow, given away or donated because if something doesn’t matter to me, I don’t need it and if I don’t need it, I probably don’t want it either.
Most of my art – that which I term The Art of Energy – carries a lot of meaning; that’s why I create it. My Yogis & Yogini series (from which were born the idea of individual Energy Portraits) express the passion and conviction that I have around yoga, around both physical and mental flexibility, around being consciously present not only in one’s body but on the earth as a functioning part of humanity. The Lovers series exists because of my very deep sense that physical love between people needs to be accepted, acknowledged and celebrated right out where everyone can see it so that the energy of intimacy between two people is made OK, is seen to be a normal, adult part of life. It’s also very much an acknowledgment of the reality of the sense that so many couples share that they’ve been together ‘before.’ Interdimensionality exists and coupling is one of many ways that almost anyone can connect to that concept. The Goddesses had to come into being if only as an expression of The Feminine in the world. The Goddesses are visual metaphors for many, many aspects of life from the profound to the ridiculous…and each one means something.
Art doesn’t always have to look good. Art can exist simply to provoke or instigate. But I enjoy creating art that does look good. Even my Injured Goddesses are beautiful. Art doesn’t always have to mean something either, though it’s usually my preference. The landscapes I paint from time to time are always drawn from photographs of places I’ve been; if I didn’t have a connection to the place, didn’t know how it felt, I couldn’t translate it very effectively into a work I’d like. So even though on the surface, the landscapes I paint might not seem to have meaning in the same way that the mixed media pieces do, they have the intrinsic meaning for me of capturing a moment in time.
I’m not a very frivolous person. Sometimes I wonder what that would be like. Everything matters so much to me…everything in this web of life has drawn me in and here I sit until the spider comes, eulogizing my surroundings.
